Unhappy Mancini
Roberto Mancini is clearly not pleased with Manchester City’s flawed striker Mario Balotelli, but the manager’s handling of his team in 2012 has raised questions about his own ability.
MOST football fans have a soft spot for flawed geniuses. After all, Youtube was invented so that those who weren’t around at the time can enjoy the sight of “Slim Jim” Baxter, socks rolled down, taunting England’s World Cup winners at Wembley, or Frank Worthington, on the edge of the penalty area and with his back to goal, flipping the ball up on his instep before lifting it over his head, then turning in the same movement to dart between two defenders and volley the dropping ball into the corner of the net.
Quite often you hear people lamenting the absence of such headstrong characters from today’s corporatised game.
But sometimes the damage they do outweighs the pleasure they give. The arrival of Baxter, already drinking heavily, wrecked the morale of Johnny Carey’s carefully assembled Nottingham Forest side a few months after the Scot’s masterclass under the Twin Towers.
Three decades later Kevin Keegan’s mid-season acquisition of the beguiling but erratic Faustino Asprilla destabilised Newcastle United’s attempt to hang on to their Premier League lead.
Older Manchester City supporters remember the disastrous introduction of Rodney Marsh in 1972. And at the heart of their club’s current problems may be the effect of a man whose existence reminds us that the notion of the flawed genius did not die with Gazza’s retirement but lives on: Mario Balotelli, of course.
Or rather not the effect of Balotelli himself, exactly, but of the way he has been handled. It would be extremely unfair to blame the erosion of City’s lead in the league on a 21-year-old who arrived in England barely a year and a half ago, knowing no one except his manager and with money falling out of his pockets.
Since Mancini gave Balotelli his Serie A debut at Internazionale, he must have known that he was buying a freakishly gifted player prone to the sort of erratic behaviour that can be amusing in short bursts and at a safe distance but is likely to try the patience of team-mates.
Attempting to accommodate the antics of his £24mil (Rm115.2mil) protege has not come easily to a disciplinarian, a control freak who was already, as his old boss Sven-goran Eriksson remembers, “a coach, a bus driver and even the kit man” when he was still a player. But Mancini’s own behaviour on Saturday, as Balotelli went through his latest routine at the end of another week of bizarre headlines, was hardly beyond criticism.
In the end it was a toss-up as to which of them behaved more like a petulant kid: Balotelli, who scored twice but also shirked his responsibilities and argued with his team-mates, or Mancini, who claimed later that he had considered removing the striker after five minutes and reacted to his 85th minute goal from open play – which put City on the way to snatching a draw against Sunderland at the Etihad (final score 3-3) – with a disgusted shake of his head.
Would Sir Alex Ferguson have allowed the world to witness a similar reaction, assuming that he had got himself into such a position in the first place? We saw from the way the Manchester United manager handled Wayne Rooney’s transfer demand in the autumn of 2010 and the recent decision to dispose of the talented but trouble-prone teenager Ravel Morrison that he knows when to apply the principles of expediency and pragmatism.
Mancini, by contrast, was behaving like a helpless romantic, sighing and shrugging as his illusions crumbled along with City’s lead.
When he was thinking about signing Balotelli, he should have recognised that here is a player with no fundamental loyalty even to the game of football, never mind to a club or his team-mates. Yes, Balotelli can do the sort of magical things that lift spectators out of the mire of ordinary existence. But Mancini’s willingness to tolerate his chronic indiscipline appears to have affected the rest of the squad to the point where even James Milner, as unselfish a player as you could find, now shows signs of dissent.
A lot of things are going wrong all at once for City, and although some of them – including Yaya Toure’s absence at the Africa Cup of Nations and Vincent Kompany’s ill-timed suspension – cannot be blamed on the manager, others are definitely his responsibility.
David Silva has been played into the ground when he should have been given recovery time. Samir Nasri has not been coaxed back into the form that persuaded City to invest another £24mil (Rm115.2mil) in him last summer. The crucial unit at the base of City’s midfield has been reshuffled unnecessarily. And with Mancini casting around for someone to get him goals, Emmanuel Adebayor is scoring freely on loan at Tottenham Hotspur, while City continue to pay, what, at least half of his notinconsiderable salary.
As the club’s fans contemplate their team’s last seven fixtures and the widening gap to the leaders, they may be wondering how much Mancini’s three Serie A titles owed to the handicap of relegation and point deductions imposed on Inter’s rivals as a result of the Calciopoli scandal.
They may also be thinking about how closely the poor showing in the Champions League this season mirrored the manager’s consistent underperformance in Europe with his former club. If they are, they can be pretty sure that City’s owner will be sharing their unease. – Guardian News & Media